GYST Day Three

Get Your Shit Together Report

Day Three

I had some wonderful friends over for a first annual "crafty hour" at which no one crafted a single thing.  We just ate and talked and had a delicious new cocktail from DAC, which, if I understand the story correctly, was supposed to be a Moscow Mule, but went wrong somewhere in Outer Mongolia.  Whatever it was, it was yummy.

So, nothing crossed off the list unless you count keeping dear friends nearby as something you put on a list.  

Maybe I should!

GYST Day Two

Get Your Shit Together Report

Day Two (Tuesday):  Seriously, this was one of those days.  Not a bad one, just one with lots to do outside the house.  Still, I did cross one thing off the list today:  "Meals for A."  My sister-in-law, whom I adore, may or may not have thyroid cancer.  She was having half of her thyroid out Tuesday, so I've been making yummy things for us for a week and doubling up for her.  That way, she can take it easy.

I went out early on the worst, coldest, drizzliest day to have a delightful birthday lunch with my super bff, L, and then off to deliver meals in Round Rock.  Threw the dinners in her freezer and sat down for a visit.  A is a trooper, and the good news is that everything looked good after the surgery.  And the even better news is that we had a lovely visit with A, my mother-in-law, and A's mother.  It was nice to slow down, have a coffee, and chat on a cold day like that.

Now, a visit wasn't on my list, and I stayed much longer than I'd intended, but those are the times that make a life.  I'm not going to sweat it; in fact, I'm going to embrace it.

Family matters.

GYST Day One

Get Your Shit Together Report

Day One (Monday):  The best laid plans. . . . Day One was supposed to begin with our usual Monday run, but it was drizzling.  And 34 degrees, which is below our relatively generous but entirely sane temperature threshold of 35 degrees, so I read the paper.  I read the paper, had some coffee, and then I got to work.  Cleaned the house - not on the list.  Did the laundry - not on the list.  Watched my taped version of the Golden Globes - not on the list.  

Things were not going well, but in the spirit of Lewis and Clark, Vasco de Gama, and Ru Paul, I stepped out where no (wo)man had gone before, and I knitted.  Okay, so that's not a stretch.  And yes, I knit all the time.  BUT I have one project that I started ages ago.  It's a scarf.  And I HATE it.  It's a beautiful pattern.  It's a beautiful, soft, dove gray yarn, but it is so fucking hard that I keep wanting to rip out every stitch, and then kill somebody.  Even the doyenne of my knitting group, who can do anything, started up the pattern after I did (she also finished before I did, no comment), and she almost gave it up, too.  But I am in the last, agonizing death throes of binding off the damn thing.  So I worked on it. 

Did I finish it?  Hell, no, but I'm moving forward.  

Other items off the list:

1.  Budget reconciliation for 1/15 pay period (woo hoo, not).

2.  Email girls re Colorado trip (intriguing, I know, I'm super excited)

3.  T - fix scanner.  There are somethings I can't do, and a smart woman knows when to ask for help.
4.  Last day of double for freezing.  Made lasagne and sausage with lentils and rice for us and for my sister-in-law, who was having surgery the following day.

Not an impressive start, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Back to Earth

A dear friend told me that it's easy to get way wrapped up in the stats/analytics of blogging.  You can obsess over every new visitor and your average time on site and all that.  Considering that I've mostly limited my readership to close friends and friends of close friends, my numbers aren't exactly high.  They could be with some self-advertisement, but I'm just not there yet.  Maybe I will be one day.  Maybe not.

Anyway, regardless of my relatively small readership, I still took great pride, and great pleasure, in my regular handful of folks checking in on me, even when I hadn't posted in a while.  In fact, I felt pretty darn special.  Until the following exchange:

From: Mom

Subject: sniff

Date: January 14, 2013 10:18:26 AM CST

To: Me

Hi there, I am sad that your blog journey is over.  Guess I'll have to change my home page now :-)  You are great!

*********************************************************************************************************************************

From: Mom

Subject: hooray

Date: January 14, 2013 10:23:09 AM CST

To: Me

Oh!  I am so excited!  Just got online and there was your new posting, with more to come!  Hot doggies.  PS, you make me laugh.

********************************************************************************************************************************

There is so much to be concerned with here, not least of which is
someone with multiple doctoral degrees using the phrase hot 
doggies, but if you were paying attention, you will have noticed
that my mom has this blog as her home page.  Which means that
everytime she goes on line to check the weather, which I can
assure you is several times a day, she hits my blog.  Which
therefore means that my mother is something like 98.2% of my
readership.  Perhaps a little bit of self-advertising is in order.

Hmmmm.

21 Days of Get Your Shit Together

They're starting another 21-day challenge at my gym today.  You sign up, you commit to workout and to eat well, and you track your progress.  As the single most competitive person alive, I fall victim to these challenges all the time.  I either out-compete everyone and get super shapely for those 21 days and then reward myself for the next 30.  Or, more often, I set totally unrealistic goals for myself and then fail epically to meet them.  Sound familiar?  Who, me?

But it's January, and I ate so much bread and drank so much wine in France and Germany that when we got back, I swore I wouldn't even want them anymore.  Tell that to the cereal and toast I had for breakfast this morning.  So, I'm challenging.  I'm challenging at the gym, and I'm challenging myself, too.  Most of the people I live with will also tell you that I'm challenging. 

Here's the plan:

Much of what was going on in this picture was a to-do list of all the projects, piddly and not, that I have lined up.  Many of them are small, some of them are easy, all of them are achievable. See that composition book there?  That's THE LIST as it looks today.  THE LIST changes and evolves, as you might imagine, as things are completed (a/k/a I write in pencil so I can erase things that I don't want to do).  THE LIST includes things as small as e-mail the landscape guy about the weevils in the agaves and things as large as 

stain and recover the new (old) chairs for the dining room.  That I bought in 2010.  Whatevs.

So, in addition to the godforsaken challenge at the gym, I am setting myself a 21-Day Get Your Shit Together challenge.  I will purposefully engage in one of the projects on this list every day, reminding myself that not all projects will be completed every day.  So, instead of The Project, I will have the projects.  

AND I am resolving to blog about it. Everyday.  For 21 days.  I've been hot and cold on these pages lately.  Excusable?  Yes.  Understandable?  Yes.  It's all okay, but I do love this blog, and I believe in what I'm trying to do here, so I need to back up my belief with some commitment.  They say it takes 21 days to make a habit.  

We'll see.

The. End.

If you're new here, for some context, you could read this or this.  You should definitely read this. 

Well, we went out with a whimper, not a bang.  And maybe that's a good thing.  It's a good thing because this project shouldn't have ever been a big deal in the first place.  For thousands of years, people got their food (sometimes more easily than others), cooked it at home, ate it together, lather, rinse, repeat.  Even Julia Child, in all her brilliance, didn't take off from the start.  In the '50s and '60s, housewifery and homemaking had become such drudgery that many home cooks had turned to packaged, boxed convenience food.  She had to convince home cooks that they could do better even in their own homes.  But whatever its incarnation, most food was still being cooked at home.

Not anymore.  There's so much quick, easy food available that your mind almost automatically defaults to running by the Sonic or picking up the phone to order pizza.  Intentional or healthy eating only means choosing Jason's Deli or Subway rather than the alternative.  And we were regular, if not habitual offenders.  I was always turning over new leaves -- ordering/buying fresh food/ making meal plans -- always with the best of intentions.  Mondays usually worked out, Tuesdays were iffy, and by Wednesday, we were off the rails.  Week after week.  And it wasn't until I stopped working that I could see the pattern.  Good intentions on Monday, rotten chard by Friday.

Let me say up front that the project we undertook and the lifestyle it has grown into would have been exponentially more difficult if I were working full time.  I volunteer quite a bit, am active in my community, and am physically active almost every day, but I still do have the time to grow food, shop for food, prep food, and cook food, all in the same day (except for the growing, of course).  There's no way I could have so rigidly kept to the project while working a full-time and stressful job like teaching.

But I wasn't working, so the project began with the intent to decrease our retail food footprint and increase our home food footprint.  And we did.  It was really hard at first.  Harder for some than for others, but definitely something we had to work at, to think about, to find our way around.  But somewhere along the way, and I couldn't tell you where or when, it just got easier.  Maybe not even easier, going out just wasn't what we did.  At some point, I didn't really have to think so much about it, to fight the urge to pull into every Sonic I saw, to dream about orange-peel beef, to obsess over the perfection of every cooked item.

It just became not a thing. Some nights I had wine and microwave nachos. Actually, many nights I had wine and microwave nachos.  But I had control over the quality of the cheese, the amount of salt in the chips, and with my own homemade salsa and an apple, it made a pretty satisfying meal for one.  Somewhere along the way, I became okay with the idea that this project didn't have to be about presenting three-course, five-star meals every night.  Clearly, I didn't.  Sandwiches, pick-ups and leftovers featured heavily in the QC rotation.  What eventually began to matter more (to me, at least) was an intentionality to our eating.  We knew where it came from and what was in it.  Period.  If that's where you start, it's pretty easy.

The Project By the Numbers:
Days on the Project: 329
Dishwasher total: 353
QC entries: 280
Percent of time we ate pickups or leftovers: approximately 25-30
Money saved:  My estimate is that we saved about 1/3 of our total food bill over the previous year.  My dear friend DD suggested a money saved total along with the Daily Dish, but T and I couldn't ever find a way to calculate it given the multiple variables, such as we were spending much less on restaurant food but much more on groceries, the quality of the groceries was probably better because I was cooking everything from scratch which added value to each meal but cost more, etc.  And honestly, I really hate math.


The girls have adjusted about like you'd expect.  G still eats out more than the rest of us - she goes out to see friends, have study groups, and generally likes fast food more than we do.  With her drivers license in the summer came the privilege to make her own decisions.  Does she always make the ones I'd choose for her?  No.  But she is armed with knowledge and control over what she does choose.  S has always loved the project because no one loves her mama's cooking like that one.  She has always had a better palate, and I think, a tenderer tummy.  She doesn't feel well when she eats crap, so her poor choices often come with more physical consequences that her sister's.  Transition is not her issue.  And T has been a trooper.  It squeezed my heart a little today when, at the arrival of some little gratin dishes for baked eggs, he asked how to make them so he could try them when he's away.  Sniff!  My thinking is that the project may appeal to him more from the financial aspect, but he appreciates good food as well, so that's a win-win.

We've just returned from our long-awaited Christmas trip to Germany and France (the one we were saving for when we started this thing), and I was absolutely blown away by the cost of a dinner out in Europe.  These were not super-fancy places but weren't fast food by any stretch, but each one cost anywhere from 80-100 euros for a family of four (with wine, duh), which is about $104-130US.  A regular, good quality meal (and let me tell you, they were delicious) was still about twice what we'd expect to pay here.  From what I can glean, there are two reasons for this:  one, the French expect high quality dining everywhere, so they are willing to pay a higher premium for quality meat, fresh and local produce, etc., and secondly, the French don't eat out much.  Some of this is because they have access to the most wonderful bread, cheese, meat, and produce on almost every street corner (bakeries) and certainly in every neighborhood (markets, butchers, etc.).  They're starting with ingredients that make it much easier to prepare quality food at home.

They also eat out like I think we all should be.  They eat out for truly special occasions.  Not twice a week, or even weekly.  So, their per-meal costs over the course of a week or a month can handle the higher price of eating out because they do it so much less than we do.  This, I think, is changing considering that on the Avenue des Talles, I saw a gorgeous, model-thin woman wearing an impossibly chic outfit and carrying a GIGANTIC Louis Vuitton bag with another in a LV shopping bag, holding a cake box.  Perched on top of the cake box, carried by this iteration of La Belle France, was a big, ole brown sack from Mickey D's.  Quel horreur!  And so it goes.

Back here at home, we've settled back into our routine.  I'll tell you that I did run into the Sonic last week (riddled with jet lag) and ordered a grilled cheese, a tiny tator tots, and a soda.  It was fine.  It was even pretty good, but it just doesn't hold the fascination that it once did.  I'd been out for five hours on a measly breakfast, and it was all that was close.  Could I have made a better choice?  Maybe, but I knew what my choices were, and I chose Sonic.  Intentional, and reasoned.  And it was fine.  But I haven't been back.  We may start to eat out more than we have - I don't know.  T and I didn't use our date exemption as much as we'd have liked, and there is something to the French way of making a dinner out something special rather than Plan B on a bad day. To be honest, I'm not really sure what eating out looks like post-project.   We'll just have to see.  I'm going to continue to QC, if only to keep myself honest.

When the kids started school this week, we shifted without discussion or discomfort right back into our pattern - meal plan, shopping, dinner at home.  We've made it an entire week without wanting to fall back into our old ways.  Maybe the true test wasn't if we could be successful while we were on the project.  Maybe the test is if we can be successful when we're off it.  I think I survived the first test well.  Tuesday's planned meal was roast chicken, which I had pulled out of the freezer Sunday thinking it would thaw.  That sucker was FROZEN SOLID Tuesday afternoon.  In the past, that would have been the most satisfying excuse to grab some take-out or head to Jason's Deli.  It wasn't until Wednesday morning that I realized that I hadn't even thought to go out.  I just grabbed some of my own chili (approaching its way-too-long-in-the-freezer date), thawed it, boiled the hotdogs I'd bought for S's sleepover the previous weekend, and roasted the cauliflower like I had planned.  It was a little weird - chili dogs and roasted cauliflower - but I knew where it came from and what was in it.

I'll call that progress.

What the Hell Happened to December?

So, you'll notice that this post is dated from somewhere in mid-January.  It appears that the last time I stopped to take a breath or look around or, God forbid, wrote anything was six weeks ago!  This has happened before (a/k/a June).  The funny thing is that when I look at it, it looks like nothing got done when actually that's the problem.  I was so busy doing it (what ever "it" is) that I was too busy to chronicle it.

And it is what it is.  I can't bring back time, and since I can barely remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, it seems unlikely that I can reconstruct the entire month.   So, with the help of my handy calendar and even more handy iPhone photos, this is what I figured out I was doing while I wasn't doing anything.

Tower of Fleece

Board Meeting
Friend for Tea
Dispense with TOWER OF FLEECE
Symphony
Can 4 quarts of salsa

Tomatoes-in-waiting

Order duffel bags for trip
Haircut
Make quiche for French class
Send kids' school pictures to grandparents (only two months late!)
Gym (x12)
Run (x12)
Make 5 fleece blankets
Make dog sweater (oh, Jesus, I have become one of them.)

Game Day Sweater.  For a dog.

"Homework" with the cousins

Tennis (x6)
Knitting Club (x3)
Retirement Party
Crochet/Knit
Christmas Party
Band concert
Church event set-up
Pick up Texas foods for Europe hosts
Presents for Texas hosts
Housesitter meeting
Kids to dentist
Return duffel bags for trip - too small
Dinner with the cousins!
Birthday party

Found this little gem
returning the bags.

Order different duffel bags
Prepare spreadsheet for meeting
Board meeting
Christmas party
Brunch with friends
Get girls warm clothes
Get more clothes
Eagle scout ceremony
Meet landscaper about sad agaves
Dogs to vet
Clean house to be gone
Pack clothes
Pack yarn
Pack presents
Pack
Pack
Pack

Go.